Not surprisingly, this was pretty much the exact same conversation I had with Kristin the first time I fixed one of our faucets. The experience actually worked out well and I’ve been fixing our faucets ever since.

Words of Wisdom: Men, if you’re ever asked to do something by one of the women in your life that you don’t want to do or more importantly, don’t ever want to do again, heed ths advice: Just do it… badly. Bite the bullet, put a helpful smile on your face, let them know you’d love to help out, and then screw up royally. If you do right, you won’t ever be asked to do it again.

Apparently, the holocaust never happened and Hitler was a swell guy just offering the Jewish people low income housing or something.

Actually, I don’t really have much to say about this boil on the butt of humanity, what really caught my eye in this news piece was this part:

Ahmadinejad’s anti-Western speeches and comments on the Holocaust have in the past caused an international outcry and isolated Iran which is at loggerheads with the West over its disputed nuclear program.

“Loggerheads”? The editors at Reuters seriously let the word “loggerheads” get posted? No, this isn’t a politically incorrect and insensitive remark about lumberjacks… it isn’t even a noun. When was the last time you were “at loggerheads with” someone?

Today is 09/09/09 which is really something. Or so we’re told. I mean, yeah… you have to ignore the fact that it’s not really the year 09, but that’s normal. It’s not like it’s really 09/09/2009, or 9/9/09, or something else less special. This is really and actually a significant moment in history, folks!

I guess this isn’t going to happen again for over 100 years or maybe even a thousand!

Next year, when 10/10/10 rolls around, it’s totally not going to be nearly as meaningful. Not as much so as 9/9/2009… er, I mean 09/09/09. And what about 11/11/11? Forget about it, THIS… THIS moment in history, this 09/09/09 isn’t coming around again EVER IN OUR LIFETIMES FOLKS!!!!

It’s the last time in the next 100 years that we’ll have the a set of repeating, single-digit dates. And since single-digit dates are clearly more special that double-digit dates… or at least single digits where we arbitrarily tack on leading zeros for days and months, but lop off those annoying preceding millennium and century numbers from the year.

It’s special, damnit… no really, it is. :-/

Other things that are as special and unique as 09/09/09:

Snow Flakes – Yeah, there may be a bazillion of them on your driveway, but under a microscope each and every one is unique.

Your Kids – Afterall, everyone knows you sired the next Joe Namath, Michael Jordan, Albert Einstein, Mozart, and Picasso all in one. No really, we all believe it just as much as you do.

Eclipses – Because there’ll never be another 57%, lower quadrant, 100 lumines, lunar, not solar, in the Northern hemisphere bordering Indiana AND Ohio during the evening hours of 11:30 to 11:35 pm not obscured by the clouds ever again in our lifetimes.

A lot of people are talking about health care reform lately. Well, not just lately. We’ve been talking about it for years. Ok, decades. In fact, health care has been so screwed since the invention of the insurance company, that our government had to step in and create Medicare back in 1965.

Why?

Why did we… a capitalist society, founded on the premise that so long as there’s a dollar to be made, people will step up to make that dollar in the most efficient manner possible… why did we need a government program to do the same thing that insurance companies could and should be doing?

Insurance companies do not exist to take care of you. Their commercials may say that you’re in safe hands with them, but taking care of you does not make them money. In fact… NOT taking care of you is the only thing that does make them money. You pay premiums to a health insurance company under the premise that when you need health care, you can file a claim so that you won’t have to pay as much money to receive that care.

Premiums = money paid to the health insurance company

Claims = money paid by the health insurance company

Profit = Premiums – Claims

This isn’t rocket science… in fact, it’s not even algebra. This is first grade addition and subtraction. The only way a health insurance company stays in business is to get you to pay THEM more money for your health care than they have to pay the doctors, hospitals, etc for your health care. Flat out fact, most people would save huge amounts of money over their lifetime if insurance companies weren’t also profiting from their health care.

So why did we need Medicare? Old people aren’t profitable. Sorry guys and gals, you’re health is expensive. In short… there is no profit in keeping you alive. Your life is nothing but a loss to insurance companies, so the only one who is interested in keeping you alive is… your government. They’re the only ones willing to operate at a loss for you.

So here we are in 2009, still talking about how screwed up our health care system is, despite the government subsidizing our most expensive citizens for the past 44 years. The price that we pay for health insurance premiums has increased at more than double the amount our wages have increased for the past decade. You pay 78% more now than you did in 2001, which is more than 4 times the amount that your paycheck has increased. Health insurance companies are making record profits and the World Health Organization rates the USA’s health care at #37 in the world, just behind such leaders in health care as Dominica and Costa Rica.

When your son or daughter gets cancer, do you really want to live in the 37th best country in the world for health care?

…

Barack Obama is on a marketing campaign of town hall meetings, to try and convince the country that the government can help us with health care if we just give them a chance. In a recent such event in Simpsonville, Republican representative Robert Inglis was fielding questions from the crowd. A man, evidently sold by Satan Palin on the fact that a national health insurance program, such as what is employed at the #1 ranked country for health care, would result in socialized medicine and “death panels”, stood up to exclaim, “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare!”

“I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,’ ” Inglis recalled. “But he wasn’t having any of it.”

Molly: I know!! I went to that concert last night!!
Kyle: Oh, there was a concert for Foreigner?Molly: yes, they are still alive!!Molly: It was Flock of Seagulls, Loverboy, and Foreigner!!Kyle: Did anyone go with you?Molly: no..I went alone…what do you think!! I went with 2 friends from high schoolKyle: Did you all know in advance who was playing?Molly: yeahMolly: wait…are you saying we were lame to go?!!? Molly: the tickets were $10Kyle: Wow, I wonder why they were so cheap!?!?

Back during the election, Kristin got fairly active with the Barack Obama campaign. One minor fallout of that was that she signed me up to be on the email list for Obama updates.

Near as I can figure, this email list has primarily been used to ask everyone for money periodically. Roughly once a month, I would receive an email with just enough fluff to not be too crass about the basic premise of, “Hey, Kyle… how about a little more cash?”

Now, the election is long over and the next election is far off in the future. There just isn’t much of a reason for a politician to be asking me for money. Or so I thought.

I got this email about a week ago from “Mitch Stewart, BarackObama.com”. and I have to say, this is the absolute worst request for a political contribution that I have ever seen. Check it out…

Kyle —

You’ve probably seen the headlines: Opponents of change are doing everything they can to delay health insurance reform. As a Republican strategy memo concluded, “If we slow this sausage-making process down, we can defeat it.”

They’re betting that as time goes by, our energy will flag, our movement will weaken, and they’ll ultimately be able to block any change.

But they just don’t get it — thanks to the regular Americans who are reaching out in neighborhoods nationwide, our movement is expanding every day. In fact, over the weekend, we surpassed our big goal of 1 million people taking action for health insurance reform. And with your help, we’ll keep growing and prove that our opponents’ strategy of “delay, delay, delay” simply won’t work.

Here’s how it works: We’ll bill your credit card for 30 days’ worth of donations now and once a month until the President signs real health insurance reform into law.

The cost of inaction on health insurance reform is astounding. Every day, 14,000 more Americans lose their coverage. Premiums continue to rise at three times the rate of wages. And each day, more small businesses are forced to choose between covering their employees and keeping their doors open.

But that doesn’t stop our opponents from trying to bog down the process with legislative tricks. And at the same time, they’re attacking the President for “moving too fast,” even though Washington has been talking about the need for comprehensive health insurance reform since the days of Harry Truman!

What they don’t realize is that outside of Washington, our campaign keeps growing. We’ve reached our “million” milestone, but the stories behind that number are even more impressive: grassroots press conferences with small-business owners in Missouri, more than 1,200 people at an organizing meeting in Minnesota, huge events outside local Senate offices in Florida, and so much more.

That’s why our dollar-a-day campaign is so important: If the few senators and representatives who are opposing reform understand that dragging their heels makes us stronger every day — and that the grassroots pressure on them will increase — they’ll be far less willing to keep slowing down the process.

Can you help? Please donate $1 per day until we pass real health insurance reform: